Emel Ertugrul

Emel Ertugrul is the Producing Artistic Director of Core Theatre Ensemble, an independent innovative theater company based out of Hampton Roads, Virginia. An alumni of Old Dominion University and North Carolina State University where she studied theater and marketing, Emel has been the guiding force behind Core since the ensemble’s formation in 2006, not only as producer but also as performer, director, writer, and teacher. As producer she has overseen every production from casting to performance, as well as the organization of all performance and teaching tours to Canada, Lithuania, Belgium, Spain and NYC. Theatrical collaborations include Centro di Creazione Teatrale, A. Pulka Physical Theater, Virginia Stage Company, Old Dominion University, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Alchemy NFK.

We long for other worlds. For all our individual reasons, which are varied and true, we long to experience the elsewhere. Be it movies, books, tv, theatre, dance, or museums, we welcomingly fall into other places. These places can provide opposition or solidarity, but always stir empathy within. They may be wholly different or strikingly similar to our own worlds but we are never alone in these places to which we have escaped. We become invested in characters and viscerally respond to their triumphs and failures. By the very essence of the human psyche, we see ourselves in these stories regardless of place or status and Virginia Stage Company's recent production of Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is proof of that.

In cold, gray, industrial abstraction The Pilot describes in euphoric detail what it means to be surrounded in blue. We are never given the blue she sees. What we do get is a precisely projected wash of fluid blue light swirling on the large steely walls that line the perimeter of her world and we can only dream of that kind of blue she describes